Young House Love

DIY Home Decorating Projects, Tutorials, & Shenanigans

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Blast From The Past: Part 1

First things first – Merry Christmas everyone! We’re busy enjoying some quality family time, so here’s a pre-prepared post for everyone to enjoy in the meantime: The other day we set out to clean up our poor little iBook’s overloaded hard-drive. It quickly turned from a mass-file-deleting to a mass-let’s-reminisce-about-this-and- then-keep-it-for-the-memories. So, the bad news is that the hard-drive didn’t get much relief. The good news is that we found fun things to share. The best of our re-discoveries was a series of video clips. Between the many clips of puppy-sized Burger we actually found a few home-related ones. Our favorites being video tours of some of our old NYC apartments that Sherry had shot

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Spreading Holiday Cheer

As mentioned in our “acceptance speech,” we planned to give a portion of our prize money from RemodelingMySpace.com’s contest to a local housing charity. So when our check arrived on Saturday it was finally time to spread the love. And this time the love went to Richmond’s Better Housing Coalition. The Better Housing Coalition has been working in Richmond for 20 years to revitalize communities in our area, primarily by taking neglected homes in historic neighborhoods and turning them into affordable housing for low-income families. For instance, they do work in Union Hill, the neighborhood featured in the TLC special “Flip It Back” we reported on a few weeks ago. We’re still learning about the

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All Good in the Hood

After 15 painfully slow days of waiting impatiently, our kitchen remodel picked back up again this Monday with the arrival of our replacement corner cabinet. Which means that the installer could come over yesterday (right at 8am, no less) to put in the final cabinet (which had to be reordered from KraftMaid due to the fact that the first one was backwards). Mike The Install Guy also took care of a few other finishing touches while he was here: adding toe kicks & shoe molding, venting the hood up through the attic and attaching the last part of our hood- all little things but they made a world of difference (proving that the devil really

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Classy Richmond vs Tacky Richmond

For the most part, Richmond is a classy city: Jeffersonian architecture, cobblestone streets, Sunday brunches, etc, etc. Even during the holidays, areas like historic Monument Avenue keep their Christmas decorations full of class- like this fancy little tree below. But I’d be lying if I told you that Monument Avenue Christmas decor was the norm around Richmond these days. This is actually the time of year where other parts of the city are happy to embrace their tacky side. Hence our beloved and famous (infamous?) Tacky Light Tour. I can’t claim to be an expert on the Tacky Light Tour, but what I do know is that it’s basically a list of homes in the

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Our Dog-Turned-Reindeer Christmas Cards

As the wait for that last cabinet continues, we’ve found another way to keep ourselves busy: holiday cards. We’re not typically holiday card people, but with a Target coupon offering up some free photo greetings we couldn’t pass up the chance to spread some cheer. Here’s the pic. It stars Burger, who fell victim to our idle hands, over-active imaginations and some photoshop: In case we forget to say it later: Happy holidays to everyone from John, Sherry and Rudolph the Red-Nosed Chihuahua.

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Our Kitchen Cabinets Are Like Mariah Carey

They’re notoriously difficult to work with. Yesterday was cabinet installation day 2 and, not unlike Monday, it came with its fair share of ups and downs. We’ll start with the ups this time. Almost all the cabinets went in, including my new favorite thing: the built in refrigerator! Totally makes our existing fridge look like some fancy schmancy custom appliance. And that opening to the right of it will make our microwave look built in as well. Yippee skippy. Here are photos of yesterday’s progress: Ok, now to play Debbie Downer. The minor hiccup of the day was discovering one of our existing wall outlets is too high and needs to be lowered so it

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Playing Architect With Floorplanner (Making 2D House Plans)

We’ve finally found a way to show off the changing layout of our house without actually inviting everyone over for a visit (although we’re always happy to give tours). The other day I was browsing RemodelingMySpace.com and saw a link to some free (!!) software called Floorplanner, which they had reviewed as an easy-to-use tool for creating 2D house plans. They also showcase software like Plan 3D and Google SketchUp if you’re looking to do more involved, 3D drawings. But I’m starting slow… Last night I cranked away on two very different floor plans: our old layout, and our almost-there new layout. Check each of them out below, but ignore the square footage and other

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Special Delivery

The cabinets arrived yesterday. Woohoo! The initial excitement of seeing the Kraftmaid 18-wheeler roll up outside was momentarily replaced by a fear that we hadn’t cleared enough temporary storage space for the boxes. Fortunately the truck wasn’t full. But I can’t say the same for our living room after the Kraftmaid guys finished moving box after box through the front door. So how does a box-filled living room turn into a cabinet-filled kitchen? First, our Home Depot project manager shows up today to inspect the delivery and make sure nothing is missing or damaged. Assuming nothing is awry (knock on wood, er, Thermofoil) the HD installer will start assembling the kitchen next Monday, Dec 3rd.

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City Slickers

After sitting in 9.5 hours of holiday traffic, we’re finally home from our whirlwind Thanksgiving weekend in New York. After a Thanksgiving gathering in Long Island followed by another family feast on Friday in New Jersey, we tackled New York City on Saturday to enjoy our old home turf. Between the two of us we lived in NYC for 8 years (in 10 different apartments and 3 different boroughs) before retreating south to my home state of VA. And the only time we lived even remotely close to each other was in Astoria, Queens. Which would’ve been great if we’d known each other then- and it hadn’t been 2 years apart. Details, details… So we

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Kitchen Indecisiveness (Picking Our KraftMaid Bel Air Cabinets)

Last week we got the call. Our cabinets are on their way! They’re arriving on Monday the 26th- which means we’re finally able to schedule all the installation details. So now it’s looking like we’ll have a kitchen before the end of the year. Happy New Year to us. When we first walked into Home Depot eons ago (i.e. September) we knew two things about our cabinets: we wanted white and we wanted KraftMaid. White because, duh, our dream kitchen says so. KraftMaid because our friend who works for a home decorating magazine swears by them. They’re close to the most expensive cabinet brand both Home Depot and Lowe’s carry, but Nancy Kulik CKD agreed

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Finally Fall

Feels like it has taken a while for autumn to hit Richmond, but it’s finally here in full force. Its late arrival probably means it won’t be long ’til all the yellows, oranges and maroons are replaced with brown and more brown, so we were sure to capture the fall colors on film while we could. Enjoy!

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